The Strange Doctrine of Kenosis
1. Kenosis allows God to voluntarily lose some of His attributes, such as omniscience. But when that happens God no longer knows Himself! What He does not know He cannot love, so the Holy Spirit is hampered, too. In particular, kenosis may require that God does not realize that He is omnipotent. Far from being Godlike, He is then a fool, lacking the most basic knowledge of His own nature. That God could become such a fool seems like a major modal defect in Him, yet the Christian concept of God requires Him to be perfect in every way. Nor is God any longer pure act, because there is in Him a potentiality to forget.
2. If Jesus could not restore His omniscience at will, then this was a limitation on His power and therefore a grave imperfection. If He did, then the claim of limited knowledge is vapid: anything He needed to find out He could find out by allowing Himself to “remember” what He allegedly lost in the process of Incarnation and kenotic “emptying.”
3. How could God restore His essence once Jesus’s job was done? Lack of omniscience regarding God’s essence means that God’s generative or begetting power was after all defective, if there was a possibility for the Father’s image of Himself — the Son — to worsen in completeness of nature.
4. Kenosis tries to diminish God’s attributes. But Jesus had “low” attributes already from His human nature! Why alter the divine nature, as well? It is precisely the union of the metaphysically perfect and the metaphysically imperfect that must be explained. One can’t explain it by saying that the divine nature was after all just like human nature or that there was no assumption of the human nature at all: the divine nature somehow became the human nature. “It is not by virtue of what he gave up, but in virtue of what he took on, that he humbled himself,” writes Morris (The Logic of God Incarnate, 104). Exactly.
So of what use is the doctrine of kenosis?